Your Site Is Your Marketplace: Techniques to Sell Your Arts and Crafts

Your website is your very own space to promote your creations, no matter what medium you work in. These artists and builders use their sites to sell handmade merchandise, paintings, books, and even instruction manuals for LEGO masterpieces! Here’s how they do it.

Promote an online shop with CTA buttons and clickable images

ARCHd is the small business of two sisters, Kristen and Lindsey Archer, in Memphis, Tennessee. They combine skills in photography, graphic design, and woodworking to create unique handmade pieces to sell at festival booths and retail locations.

WordPress.com Premium or Business customers can make their own buttons with custom CSS.

Kristen and Lindsey make it easy to browse and buy their items: visit their website, and you’ll immediately see a “Shop” button front and center, which directs visitors to their Etsy store. This handy call-to-action (CTA) button is built into their theme, Port, but you can display CTA buttons on other themes, too.

Aside from CTA buttons, there are other ways to direct potential customers to your online shop. Simply link to your Etsy store in your main menu — you can add a custom link to an external site so readers can go directly to the shop.

If you’d like a more prominent or visual link, consider an Image Widget. Artist Sarah Goodreau leads readers to her Society6 page with a custom image — a black triangle with a “Buy Prints” message — displayed as an Image Widget in her sidebar.

Or, create a page with clickable banners that direct readers to your multiple shops, as Rebecca Barkley demonstrates on her site, B.Inspired Art. Visit the Shop tab in her main menu to see how she leads visitors to her Etsy and Redbubble stores.

On her sketching blog, artist Georgina Potter posts her oil, pastel, and charcoal artwork and places a payment button at the bottom of every post — and removes the button when the piece has sold.

Showcase books and creative projects in eye-catching galleries

Take note of the techniques used on Amador and Ramón’s well-designed site, Arvo Brothers. With a background in LEGO design and video games, they now work on LEGO building projects and high-quality instruction books — and they promote and sell this work in a variety of ways.

This is a great help. I do wonder how I can incorporate a button as I have an online journal and I need ideas to balance this theme of really my journal is a way for others to see my process and I don’t want that to feel like I am selling. Maybe the image sounds good. I hope you do a piece on how to grow more fans. Are there any workshops here for that?

Note that custom CSS is available to Premium and Business plan users — if you don’t have either plan, you are free to test out custom CSS in the Customizer and can see the changes live, but must purchase a plan in order to finalize the changes. With these plans, you can also ask questions/troubleshoot CSS with live chat: https://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/css-support-in-live-chat/